Friday, 26 August 2011

Ability to rotate point marker and label independently in Civil 3D was customers’ wish for a while. With Civil 3D 2012 that wish has been granted. You could have read about Rotating Labels on Being Civil site. You may also remember how tedious this task was in previous versions. Our own, Seth Hall blogged about it before in his Rotate Point Marker Independently of the point Label post; but new way is easier, more elegant and does more. The following post goes one step further and explains other options available with this tool. If you click on the marker symbol of a point, you will notice options which would allow you to move point, rotate marker and rotate both label and marker altogether.

Clicking on upper grip (rectangular) will give you options to do move or rotate label as well as “Toggle sub item grips”. With this option you can grip edit individual pieces of label and position it the way you want it.

If your point marker and point label are already rotated you may notice some more options. Reset all will bring point marker and label to its default position. Others are self explanatory.

Wednesday, 24 August 2011

The vast majority of Civil 3D users know about the FDO (Feature Data Objects) Data Connect. From a Civil perspective, we would recognize the performance benefit of inserting a large image via FDO over actually inserting the image into the drawing. However from the Map 3D perspective there is some much more to it. Once you start learning about Map 3d you realize how crucial this feature is in this product. You literally connect to everything. Databases, images, SHP, and the list goes on.

Connections allow you to work with multiple sources of data within one drawing, and completely bypasses any need to actually import the data into the current drawing. This “round-tripping” or import and exporting of data could be a very cumbersome process and also has the potential to affect the integrity of the original GIS data. Connections via FDO allow you to work with the data in it’s native format.

This is what I found most interesting about playing around with all these connections, is that you can edit and save back to the connection’s native format. Say you connect to a SHP file that contains existing water line information, and you decide to add to this water line from within Map 3D. You can do so and it updates that original SHP file. Maybe I am easily amused, but I thought this was pretty cool. I will cover this a bit more in depth (for me at least) in an upcoming post.

Going through this new Map stuff can be pretty scary at times, however the Data Connect dialog and the Map Task Pane is a good place to start. It’s like an old friend letting you know everything is going to be OK :)

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

If you are anything like myself, you may have little to no experience with Map 3D other than attaching an occasional image or playing around with the Map Task Pane. Seeing how we are now offering the multi level Infrastructure Design Suites, I thought I would challenge myself to pick up some “odds and ends” of Map 3D knowledge to help with the ever blurring lines between Civil 3D and Map 3D.

If you have taken advantage of all the Suites have to offer, you may be looking at the other titles in the portfolio and saying to yourself “where do I start?” This is where I find myself, however with the help of local geospatial expert (and newest addition to our blog) I have a bit more guidance to begin.

Over the next few weeks or so I plan on sharing little bits of what I am picking upon this journey of expanding my mind with Map 3D. Some observations may be elementary at best… but hey, you have to start somewhere, right? Come join me!

Monday, 22 August 2011

We are growing Our Infrastructure and Geospatial Team in Europe and are looking for talented Civil and Geospatial experts who loves working directly with customers and are multi-lingual and fluent English and either French, German or Italian. Locations either beautiful and charming Neuchâtel in Switzerland or fun loving and exciting Munich, Germany.

Friday, 19 August 2011

The Infrastructure Team is expanding! Are you a technical person who loves working directly with customers? I am looking to hire two new Product Support Specialists to join our team.

The first is located on the west coast with a strong Geospatial background and advanced knowledge of AutoCAD Map 3D and/or Mapguide. The second is located in Brazil, requiring a high-level knowledge of AutoCAD Civil 3D. Fluent in Brazilian-Portuguese is a must.

Thursday, 18 August 2011

Here is an outstanding post published on BIM on the Rocks blog site by our own Dana Probert, that we felt needed to be shared with our readers. It is about showing how to tie LinkWidthAndSlope to Existing Surface when right-of-way has irregular limits. Very creative and with great images. Warmly recommended. You may find it here.

Wednesday, 17 August 2011

I recently had a customer asking how Civil 3D determined how to adjust profiles when locking them together to build an intersection. Specifically, what if you had a constraint in place for the secondary road profile (travel at –2% for 100’ from the main road centerline, for example.) Does the main road profile move to match the secondary road profile, or does the secondary road profile arbitrarily move to match the main road profile? As it turns out, you have options here, you just have to know where to go to set them. Find out more after the jump.